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Blok says somewhere: “We, the children of Russia's terrible years.” Blok meant this in a metaphorical, figurative sense. The children were not children, but the sons, the heirs, the intelligentsia, and the terrors were not terrible but sent from above, apocalyptic; that's quite different. Now the metaphorical has become literal, children are children and the terrors are terrible, and there you have the difference.
This is the second of a two part special issue on children affected by armed conflict: views from the global south. In this part we focus on psychosocial intervention.
From its inception, psychoanalysis has been concerned with the emotional life of children and the powerful effects of external experience on their internal lives and future development (Freud, 1974a, 1974b, 1974d; Herman, 1997). As the newly formed psychoanalytic community developed its practice in Europe, the first generation analysts found that when working with communities facing adversity, such as the urban slums of Berlin and Vienna, attention paid to the internal lives of their patients had to occur within the context of their practical experiences. These analysts pioneered programs that addressed the internal lives of patients within the context of supporting their external ones (Danto, 2009).
Like the clinicians in this issue, Anna Freud, Dorothy Burlingham and Donald Winnicott were all living in time of war in Great Britain, when neither the outcome of the war, its duration, nor the extent of the violence on the European continent were known. Anna had come fresh from Vienna, where she was aware of the techniques for working with families facing adversity employed there by her fathers' followers (Danto, 2005). In 1939, thousands of British children were evacuated to the countryside to protect them from aerial bombardment (Winnicott, 1984). Freud and her collaborator Dorothy Burlingham, and separately, analyst and pediatrician Donald Winnicott